The National Interest - What washington and jefferson (eventually) agreed
on

Quarrels over the national interest commenced with America's birth
as an independent nation. Nearly everyone in the Continental Congress, and
everyone not a Loyalist, agreed on the advisability of an alliance with
France and cheered when that alliance was obtained in 1778. But no sooner
had the French held up their end of the bargain—by cornering
Cornwallis at Yorktown—than Americans began to squabble about how
far beyond victory attachment to France ought to extend. Benjamin
Franklin, the senior American commissioner in Paris, counseled continued
closeness, both from gratitude for services already rendered and in
expectation of additional French aid. Franklin doubtless was influenced by
the adulation he received in Paris (a staged meeting between Franklin and
Voltaire set the philosophes swooning), but, personal popularity aside, he
believed the infant United States would need French help to avoid being
sucked back into Britain's orbit. Franklin's fellow
commissioners, John Adams and John Jay, were more inclined to doubt French
bona fides and less inclined to fear the attraction of America's
late colonial master. (Adams in addition suffered from excruciating envy
of Franklin, and his Puritan mores were scandalized by Franklin's
liaisons with the ladies of Paris.) As it happened, the tension between
the two conceptions of the infant national interest produced a peace
treaty that preserved the alliance with France while extracting important
concessions from Britain.

Unfortunately, the concessions proved to be more impressive on paper than
on the ground— particularly the ground of the Ohio Valley and the
Great Lakes. The British refused to evacuate forts in the region and
defied the Americans to do anything to oust them. (The rationale for their
continued occupation was the failure of the American government to honor
pledges regarding debts and Loyalists, but their reason was simply that
they could, and that influential groups in Britain defined
Britain's national interest as holding what Britain had.) Thomas
Jefferson, who had inherited Franklin's Francophilia along with
Franklin's diplomatic post in Paris, and who carried this attitude
to his position as President George Washington's secretary of
state, found the British intransigence insufferable. The group that grew
up around Jefferson—the nascent Republican Party—agitated to
punish perfidious Albion.

Their cause was complicated by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and
the onset of the wars provoked by that pregnant event. For most of a
century, the American colonies had been caught in the crossfire between
Britain and France; the most recent installment of this modern Hundred
Years' War had sprung the colonies free from Britain's
grasp. But freedom did not preserve them when the crossfire resumed in
1792. The question that then faced Americans was: With which side did the
American national interest lie?

Jefferson and the Republicans answered the question one
way—France's way. The Jeffersonians did not necessarily
forgive French violations of American neutrality (centering on seizure of
American ships), but they felt more threatened by Britain's
infractions, which now also included seizure of ships. The more fervent
among them would have repaid French help in the war of the American
Revolution with American help in this war of the French Revolution; yet
even those who stopped short of wanting to honor the alliance to the
letter conceived a kinship with the new republic on the Atlantic's
eastern shore. In this view (and in a pattern that would persist for two
centuries in American politics), the national interest at home and the
national interest abroad were intimately entwined. Domestic republicanism
dictated support for foreign republicanism.

Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists demonstrated a similarly married
definition of the national interests at home and abroad. Hamilton was no
great fan of American republicanism, having argued at the Constitutional
Convention for a monarchy; not surprisingly, he held no candle for French
republicanism. On the contrary, he admired the energetic executive of the
British government (which he did his best to imitate as
Washington's Treasury secretary and most trusted adviser), and he
judged that America's future lay in close ties to Britain's
governing and merchandising classes.

The national interest was whipsawed between the Republican and Federalist
views for two decades. The Federalists (under Washington) negotiated and
ratified the easy-on-Britain Jay's Treaty and (under John Adams)
fought an undeclared naval war against France. During this conflict, the
Federalists succeeded in outlawing—by the Sedition Act—their
opponents' definition of the national interest. The Republicans
(under James Madison) fought a formal war against Britain. The
Republicans' war—of 1812—was a fiasco for the United
States, with the burning of Washington City being but the most egregious
example of America's inability to defend itself.

Yet the conflict had the salutary effect of ending the first phase of the
debate over the national interest. Americans had learned something from
their long ordeal. The Bonapartist turn of events in France cured the
Jeffersonians of their revolutionary romanticism, while the Hamiltonians
(who lost their champion in the infamous duel with Aaron Burr) were
disabused of their Anglophilia by British impressment of American seamen.
Both sides settled on the wisdom of staying out of other countries'
wars. George Washington had urged eschewing "permanent
alliances"; Thomas Jefferson denounced "entangling
alliances." Permanent or entangling, alliances seemed unwise, and a
strong majority of Americans concurred in keeping clear of them. No
definition of the national interest would persist longer or sustain more
general acceptance than this idea that other people's quarrels were
for other people to settle. God in his wisdom had put an ocean between
Europe and America; Americans in their wisdom had crossed it. Most saw no
reason to cross back.